Will we ever be able to buy a fair-trade smartphone?

ETHICALLY sourced coffee is easy to find nowadays, but it is hard to feel good about where your smartphone comes from. The industry is beset by allegations of factory-worker abuse, of raw materials being sourced from conflict zones, and of generating mountains of electronic waste.

Taiwanese manufacturing giant Foxconn, which produces about 40 per cent of the world's electronics products, including iPhones, has recently come under fire over poor working conditions and high suicide rates at its plants in China.

On 29 March, the firm announced that its employees would be working shorter hours and enjoying higher wages. It is a step in the right direction, but when New Scientist tried to find out whether an ethically produced cellphone exists, the answer was a resounding "no".

Most of the major electronics producers, Foxconn among them, have now signed the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition code of conduct, which includes undertakings to abide by local labour laws and lessen the environmental impact of their activities. The EICC helps to develop the code, but its role does not extend to auditing its members' compliance.

Although much attention has focused on manufacturing, less is known about working conditions at the mines that supply raw materials for phones. In China, the world's main producer of rare-earth metals, mines are prone to cave-ins and child labour is common, as it is at mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The DRC produces half the world's cobalt, used in batteries, and is also an important source of gold and the "three Ts" - tungsten, tin and tantalum - which are present in the capacitors and circuitry in phones. Profits from mining these "conflict minerals" often go towards funding armed factions.

A 2010 US financial reform bill known as the Dodd-Frank act requires companies to carry out due diligence to ensure their metals are not sourced from conflict areas. Sasha Lezhnev, an analyst with the Enough Project in Washington DC, which campaigns to end "crimes against humanity", says the act has had some success. Production of tantalum from conflict areas has since fallen by 75 per cent. And because US electronics companies - the biggest buyers - are going elsewhere, the price of minerals from such conflict areas has dropped by two-thirds, making them less appealing to rebel groups as a source of funds. Apple has been one of the leaders in auditing its supply chain, says Lezhnev.

"In the DRC, there have been 4 million deaths in the last 10 years: there's a relationship between phones and that problem," says Bas van Abel, founder of FairPhone, a Dutch initiative. By working with communities in the DRC and online, Fairphone hopes to design what it believes will be the world's first cellphone that will be both open-source and responsibly manufactured. The question is: will consumers really pay extra for one?

Yes, says Patricia Jurewicz of the Responsible Sourcing Network, a non-profit organisation in San Francisco. The clothing industry demonstrates that people are willing to pay more if they know a product is ethically sourced, she says. "Consumers want good products that are not exploiting people and not trashing the planet. But they have no idea which companies are good or bad," she says.

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